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In the past fortnight, I’ve been quite absorbed in zines – I finished off all the writing for my zine, and spent four afternoons putting it together. Then came the best part of the zine-making process – getting the flat sheets printed at the university Print Shop. I love seeing how my zine turns out through the photocopier, and as usual, it turned out really well. I love the Print Shop; I don’t know how I’ll manage without it when I graduate!

I went through my “zines” folder in my email account a few days ago and found that I had sent my zines out to five different US distros for consideration last November and hadn’t heard anything from them, despite having asked them to let me know when the zines arrived. I emailed two of the distros the other day and said that I assumed that they didn’t like my zines, and could they give me some feedback. I got a short email back from one distro a few hours later telling me that my zines had girl-hate in them and she couldn’t stock them as it would reflect badly on her distro. Although I kinda knew that that would be the problem with my zines (and in a way, I should be glad that girl-hate was the only serious problem of the zine), it still upset me. Sometimes I worry that this girl-hate thing has given me a bad reputation in the zine world. I mean, it’s just so anti-feminist and arrogant, to hate other women and judge them because of the way they dress, and to think that you’re in a way better than other women. I feel so guilty and ashamed about it all; I regret wasting so many years envying other women, and I really regret writing about it in my zine. I got upset on the phone to Hank, and he told me that I could’ve written worse things. I guess that’s true, and I have read a few zines which were far more hateful than mine, but I’m not sure it excuses my actions.
I just… I know that it was a terrible way to think, but I can understand why I thought that way. Most of the women I met in my teenage years had that tendency to judge other women, and I think I accepted it as normal. Girl-hate and jealousy was a part of my everyday life from the age of about 12 onwards, and although I knew that it was unhealthy, in a way I still accepted it as a normal part of being a young woman. I thought the only way to overcome girl-hate was to become happy enough with myself that I wouldn’t need to be jealous of other women. But I don’t think it works that way. Jealousy is such a pervasive force in our society that I think it will take years of work to eradicate it (and even then, it’ll never disappear completely). But I am working on it, and things are getting better for me. I’ve written about these feelings in my zine if you want to read more of my thoughts on the issue.

I’ve been feeling quite lonely recently. For this whole month, all I’ve done is work in the library, attend my lectures, go food shopping, and stay in my bedroom. My close friend has been ill and swamped with essay work, and the Women’s Network has been on an unofficial hiatus due to Student Union elections (which half the committee were involved in), the NUS Women’s Campaign conference, and general essay deadline stress. I haven’t done anything exciting for weeks! Thankfully I’m going home for Easter on 1st April, so things will be a bit more eventful for me then. I’ll get to spend my first week off with Hank and some of his friends, which is going to be awesome, since we haven’t seen each other for 6 weeks. I’m also looking forward to getting some Easter eggs and having a nice Easter lunch with Hank’s family. Sadly, Hank will be going back to Leeds after my first week off, so I’ll have the next two weeks of my holiday without him. At least I’ll have my family to spend time with while I’m at home, so I won’t be alone really.

101 Things Update: I failed 2 challenges – to practice the piano and bass 4 times a week. I’ve been really busy this week with essay work and procrastination – sadly my procrastination did not involve playing any musical instruments, but mostly involved reading crap on the internet and dying my hair. So it goes.
I did complete one challenge – to grow flowers in my garden! I planted some bulbs last autumn and they have grown – I have daffodils and tulips growing! Unfortunately, there is some Japanese Knotweed growing back in my garden, and I’m very scared that it will kill my pretty flowers. I’m going to attack it with weed killer before I go home.